US Astronaut is First to Visit Space and Deepest Ocean
On June 7, US astronaut Dr. Kathy Sullivan became the first person to travel to both space and the deepest part of the ocean by going down almost 11 kilometres to Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean.
At 68, she is also the first woman to visit Challenger Deep, which is found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench near the island of Guam.
Sullivan's visit was part of the Ring of Fire expedition by Caladan Oceanic and EYOS Expeditions. Caladan Oceanic was started by explorer Victor Vescovo, who joined Sullivan on the journey.
The trip to the bottom of the ocean took about four hours, and Sullivan said it was like "a magic elevator ride." She and Vescovo ate lunch on the way down, then spent about 1.5 hours exploring the seafloor. During the return journey, the two watched a movie together — 1975's The Man Who Would Be King.
Vescovo says the goal of the expedition is to get people more interested in the sea and science. Sullivan said that Vescovo sent her an email inviting her to join him because he thought it was "really time" for a woman to visit Challenger Deep.
Sullivan first visited space in 1984. As part of that mission, she became the first US woman to walk in space. The first woman to ever walk in space was Russian cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya, who did so a few months before Sullivan.
Sullivan visited space two other times in her career, in 1990 and in 1992, spending a total of 532 hours off planet Earth. In 1990 she was part of the team that put the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit.
